Capital, Class & Technology in Contemporary American Culture

Nick Heffernan

Description

In the tradition of Mike Davis and Fredric Jameson, Nick Heffernan engages in a series of meditations on capital, class and technology in contemporary America.



He turns to the stories we generate and tell ourselves - via fiction, film journalism, theory - to see how change is registered. By investigating a variety of texts, he observes how structural change affects the way people organise their lives economically, socially and culturally. Case studies include Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, William Gibson's cyberspace trilogy, Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, and Wim Wenders's Until the End of the World.



Using the links between narrative cultural forms and the process of historical understanding, he brings together debates that have so far been conducted largely within the separate domains of political economy, social theory and cultural criticism to provide a compelling analysis of contemporary cultural change. By relocating postmodernism in the context of changing modes of capitalism, Heffernan puts the question of class and class agency back at the centre of the critical agenda.
Introduction

Part 1. Late Capitalism, Fordism, Post-Fordism

1. Postmodernism and Late Capitalism

2. Class and Consensus, Ideology and Technology

Part 2. Putting 'IT' to Work: Post-Fordism, Information Technology and the Eclipse of Production

3. Making 'IT': The Soul of a New Machine

4. Faking 'IT': True Stories

5. Playing with 'IT': Microserfs

Part 3. Impotence and Omnipotence: The Cybernetic Discourse of Capitalism

6. Cybernetics, Systems Theory and the End of Ideology

7. Imaginary Resolutions: William Gibson's Cyberspace Trilogy

8. Artificial Intelligence and Class Consciousness: Blade Runner

Part 4. Capital, Class, Cosmopolitanism

9. Fordism, Post-Fordism and the Production of World Space

10. National Allegory and the Romance of Uneven Development: The Names

11. Blindness and Insight in the Global System: Until the End of the World

Conclusion: Questioning Fordism and Post-Fordism

Notes

Bibliography

Sujets

• Political Ideologies
• Political Science
• Democracy

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 20 décembre 2000
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781849645188
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Nick Heffernan

CAPITAL, CLASS AND TECHNOLOGY IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN CULTURE Projecting Post-Fordism

P Pluto Press LONDON • STERLING, VIRGINIA

Disclaimer: Some images in the original version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook.

First published 2000 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA and 22883 Quicksilver Drive, Sterling, VA 20166–2012, USA

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Copyright © Nick Heffernan 2000

The right of Nick Heffernan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Heffernan, Nick. Capital, class, and technology in contemporary American culture : projecting post- Fordism / Nick Heffernan. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0–7453–1105–9 (hbk) — ISBN 0–7453–1104–0 (pbk.) 1. United States—Social conditions—1980– 2. Social change—United States. 3. Capitalism—United States. 4. Postmodernism—Social aspects—United States. I. Title. HN59.2 .H44 2001 306'.0973—dc21 00–009740

ISBN 0 7453 1105 9 hardback ISBN 0 7453 1104 0 paperback

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0807 9

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Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Publishing Services Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton Printed in the European Union by TJ International, Padstow

Part 3

Part 2

Part 1

3. 4. 5.

13 29

Putting ‘IT’ to Work: Post-Fordism, Information Technology and the Eclipse of Production

Making ‘IT’:The Soul of a New Machine Faking ‘IT’:True Stories Playing with ‘IT’:Microserfs

Postmodernism and Late Capitalism Class and Consensus, Ideology and Technology

1. 2.

Introduction

Late Capitalism, Fordism, Post-Fordism

Cybernetics, Systems Theory and the End of Ideology Imaginary Resolutions: William Gibson’s Cyberspace Trilogy Artificial Intelligence and Class Consciousness:Blade Runner

Impotence and Omnipotence: The Cybernetic Discourse of Capitalism

Part 4

6. 7. 8.

Notes Bibliography Index

Capital, Class, Cosmopolitanism

9. Fordism, Post-Fordism and the Production of World Space 10. National Allegory and the Romance of Uneven Development: The Names 11. Blindness and Insight in the World System:Until the End of the World Conclusion: Questioning Fordism and Post-Fordism

v

165

39 72 88

105 119 148

Contents

216 230 245

179 205 212

1

Introduction

My purpose in this book is to explore the ways in which the stories we generate and tell ourselves, through literary fiction, film, journalism and social and cultural theory, register and represent change. The kind of change I’m particularly interested in might best be called structural – historic transformations of the ways our lives are organised and shaped economically, socially and culturally. It is my view that for the last twenty years or so the question of structural change has been asked most persistently, embracingly and, at times, confusingly through the terms postmodernism and postmodernity. Broadly speaking, I understand postmodernism to refer to a range of more or less novel aesthetic styles, cultural attitudes and philosophical or political positions which to varying degrees are expressions of and responses to historical change. Postmodernity, on the other hand, can perhaps best be understood as a description of that wider historical condition and experience of 1 change out of which the various expressive postmodernisms arise. Amongst all the disagreement, debate and polemic that surround these terms it is possible to identify at least one consistent proposition: that the postmodern is not a cultural matter alone, that it bears some kind of relation to the transformations wrought by, and within, contemporary capitalism, and that to inquire into the postmodern is also necessarily to inquire into the nature of Western capitalist societies as they have developed since, roughly, 1945. It is perhaps no surprise, then, that some of the most influential theorisations of the postmodern have come from the political left, nor that the debate about postmodernism has become a vehicle for the interrogation, contestation and reappraisal of many of the categories and assumptions of left politics in general and 2 Marxism in particular. Two of the earliest American formulations of postmodernism, at least in the sense which predominates in the present debate about cultural change, came from the left cultural critics Irving Howe and C. Wright Mills. In his essay ‘Mass Society and Post-Modern Fiction’ (1956), Howe used the term to denote the proximity of ‘enormous changes in human history’ which, he claimed, were set to undermine the collective assumption that ‘the social relations of men in the world of capitalism were established, familiar, knowable’ (Howe, 1963: pp. 96, 80). Similarly, Mills inThe Sociological Imagination(1959), argued that Western societies were in the throes of ‘an epochal kind of transition’ in which ‘the Modern Age is being succeeded by a post-modern period’. We were ill-equipped to come to terms with this transition because the ‘post-modern period’ according to Mills, was defined precisely by a crisis in historical understanding due to the fact that ‘our major orientations – liberalism and socialism – have virtually collapsed as adequate explanations of our world and of ourselves’ (Mills, 1983: p. 184). The most influential recent theorisation of postmodernism has come from the Marxist critic Fredric Jameson for whom the term likewise suggests the arrival of radically new

1

2 CAPITAL, CLASS AND TECHNOLOGY IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN CULTURE cultural and social forms associated with the ‘systemic modification of capitalism’, specifically with the onset of what he calls the ‘historically original’ stage of late capitalism (Jameson, 1991: pp. xii, 3). But the connection between postmodernism and the structural transformation of capitalism is present even in the thinking of overtly anti- or post-Marxists for whom the notion of ‘postindustrial society’ rather than late capitalism or mass society serves as a reference point. Thus for Daniel Bell and Jean Baudrillard the transformation consists in the displacement of industrial production by consumption and image-manipulation; while for Jean-François Lyotard it is bound up with the effects and imperatives of new technologies, with the ‘computerisation’ of society, and the new importance of scientific knowledge and information, rather than industrial hardware, as means of production (Bell, 1973 and 1976; Baudrillard, 1975 and 1981; Lyotard, 1984). One problem raised by all these formulations is the extent to which postmodernism should be understood as marking a decisive historical break in the cultural and social development of the capitalist West. Jameson, for instance, argues that the very ‘case for its existence depends on the hypothesis of some radical break orcoupure, generally traced back to the end of the 1950s or the early 1960s’ (Jameson, 1991: p. 1). Bell, on the other hand, sees postmodernism as the logical extension of classical bourgeois individualism allied to antinomian and hedonistic impulses set in motion by the modernist art and culture of the late nineteenth century and the nascent consumer capitalism of the 1920s respectively (Bell, 1976). While Jameson has conceded that arguments for a break or a continuity are essentially groundless – he sees them as the opening gambits of competing stories about our recent history which are neither ‘empirically justifiable’ nor ‘philosophically arguable’ (Jameson, 1991: p. xiii) – it is nonetheless the case that they do raise certain conceptual problems for our understanding of the periodisation and dynamics of cultural change. For example, as Perry Anderson has observed, Jameson’s strategy of basing his notion of postmodernism on Ernest Mandel’s monumental account of late capitalism sits somewhat uneasily with his own claims for the centrality of a radical break occurring somewhere around 1960 (Anderson, 1998: pp. 78–9). For, according to Mandel (1978), epochal change in the capitalist mode of production occurs between 1940 and 1945. Jameson’s point of historical rupture does not therefore straightforwardly accord with Mandel’s description of historical transformation, a difficulty that is not entirely resolved by Jameson’s claims about the non-synchronous relationship between economic and socio- cultural change (Jameson, 1991: p. xix). The implications of this are pursued in Chapter 1 below. Wary of these difficulties, other commentators have sought to understand the cultural change denoted by postmodernism and postmodernity less as an epochal transformation of the entire capitalist mode of production and more in terms of a limited structural recomposition of social and economic relationships within late capitalism. Mike Davis (1985), Scott Lash and John Urry (1987), David Harvey (1989) and Stuart Hall (1989) all see postmodernism as, in some respects at least, bound up with the economic and social crises that have beset the capitalist West since the late 1960s when the sustained economic boom of the post-Second World War period climaxed and entered a decline. In particular, it is argued that certain widely identified characteristics of the postmodern can be traced in some way to the

INTRODUCTION 3 break-up of certain social and cultural arrangements that had underpinned the long boom as a shift occurs towards new relationships and structures, through which a resolution of the economic crisis is sought. One way of looking at this transformation within late capitalism is by using the notions of Fordism and post-Fordism. Broadly speaking again, Fordism refers to the way in which economic, social and even cultural life was organised in the United States and Western Europe for the duration of the long postwar boom between 1945 and the early 1970s. The principal feature of this period was the establishment of a durable balance between the mass production of standardised goods on the one hand, and the mass consumption of such goods on the other. Crudely put, this balance (or ‘equilibrium’ as economists are wont to call it) worked to offset capitalism’s inherent tendency towards crises of overproduction and underconsumption. Such crises, of which the Great Depression of the 1930s is the most recent and notable manifestation, had repeatedly ravaged capitalist societies and derived from the fact that wealth, or purchasing power, was not sufficiently widely distributed across the population always to ensure that there would be an adequate market for ever increasing volumes of industrially produced goods. Periodically, production – driven by the desire of owners and employers for constantly rising profits – so drastically outstripped the ability of purchasers to absorb and consume goods as to seriously disrupt the cycle of profitability, causing widespread failure of over-extended firms and the social blight of unemployment and deepening immiseration. The apparent elimination of such crises in the post-1945 period by the establishment of a new equilibrium between the spheres of production and consumption rested on a particular reconfiguration of class relationships, what has sometimes been called the ‘capital–labour accord’ (Bowles and Gintis, 1982: p. 55). The market’s ability to absorb ever expanding rates of production was secured by an extension and deepening of the purchasing power of the population at large. Capital, in the form of owners and employers, granted – indeed in many cases guaranteed – workers a steadily rising standard of living through regular increases in wages. In return, organised labour conceded to employers’ demands for tougher discipline and extended managerial power in the workplace, held to be the keys to improved productivity and higher profits. Typically this involved workers submitting to stricter supervision and bureaucratisation (or ‘scientific management’) of tasks, accepting the constant technological restructuring of the workplace (increasingly involving the replacement of workers by automated machinery), and restricting expressions of protest and discontent to narrowly prescribed official channels (‘no strike’ pledges became a feature of the deals American labour unions struck with employers in the postwar period). Of course this class compromise, or trade-off between rising productivity and rising wages, did not materialise entire overnight, nor did it descend like a prefabricated model upon American capitalism in order to provide for a new epoch of stability and prosperity. It represented the always relatively fluid and precarious outcome of a whole series of conflicts, struggles and negotiations between workers and employers that remained continually in process. Nonetheless, the balance between production and consumption that it produced meant that increasing numbers of the working population were now able to consume (or at least aspire to consume) the very goods

4 CAPITAL, CLASS AND TECHNOLOGY IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN CULTURE that they helped manufacture and were thus presented with the prospect of entering into a charmed circle of prosperity and growth. The state, too, played its part in the equation by underwriting this balance of class forces. The social welfare apparatus, perfected and consolidated in the post- 1945 period, guaranteed a minimum level of subsistence or purchasing power for workers, while heavy government subsidies to whole sectors of production (most importantly the armaments and aerospace industries) guaranteed markets, and hence profits, for employers. For 25 years this close relationship between the liberal democratic state and the capitalist accumulation process appeared to deliver stable growth and widening prosperity free from the cyclical crises that had dogged capitalist society in earlier periods. Forged in the United States in the mid-1940s, the Fordist model was exported to Europe and even beyond (a very distinct kind of Fordism developed in Japan, for instance) via Marshall aid and under the aegis of American global military and financial supremacy, so that the period since the Second World War, in the capitalist world at least, can in many respects be understood as Fordist in character. Post-Fordism refers to the disintegration of this world in the recurrent economic and social crises that have beset Western capitalist societies since the early 1970s, and to the various patterns according to which its elements might be recomposed in the periods of restructuring which have ensued. While there is considerable agreement about what is meant by Fordism, post-Fordism is a much more disputed category. I’ll give a fuller account of both terms in Chapter 1 below, but it is perhaps worth stating at this point that post-Fordism is best seen not as any fully achieved entity but as a projection of, or metaphor for, the processes and effects of social and economic restructuring within contemporary capitalist societies, the final form of which cannot be specified. There are many versions of post-Fordism on offer in this period of flux in which the notion of ‘restructuring’ has become a commonplace. None of these can be considered completely authoritative; indeed some versions contain strong elements of prescription which betray a more than accidental connection to the interests of particular social groups. For example, there is what we might call a managerial or employers’ post-Fordism which stresses the importance of a new ‘flexibility’ in labour practices and relations. This, while partly describing what is presently occurring, is also an expression of employers’ concerns perpetually to lower wage costs and have compliant workers. The description thus seeks in part to legitimate the further extension of what is being described. Similarly there is what we might call a professional middle-class or culturalist post-Fordism which emphasises decentralisation, demassification and the demise of Fordist standardisation, particularly in the field of consumption, as key features of ‘new times’. Pointing to the rise of new kinds of individualism, self-definition and identity formation, this description reflects the interests, experience and world views of those professional groups, often located in the cultural industries or involved with the dissemination of new microelectronic technologies, which receive their rewards for constructing and propagating new forms of consumption or ‘lifestyle’. To propose a settled definition of post-Fordism is therefore not only empirically unjustifiable, it also involves certain ideological risks concerning preciselywhosepost-Fordism is being described. I will use the term not to denote any particular social and economic configuration but to point to what might be seen as a projected and highly contested social space in which various competing understandings and descriptions of change

INTRODUCTION 5 circulate and toward which the current processes of restructuring can be seen as tending. Clearly, though, given that it marks a sharp departure from Fordist arrangements, post-Fordism implies significant changes in patterns of work, production and consumption, in the balance of class forces, and in the conditions that circumscribe action and shape identity that are wide ranging in their effects and not limited purely to the economic sphere. Indeed, one of the advantages of using the notions of Fordism and post-Fordism to investigate contemporary cultural change is that their reach extends across the economic, the social and the cultural without necessarily implying that the latter categories merely reflect processes that occur in the former. They suggest, rather, the interaction and interpenetration of economy, society and culture. As Stuart Hall has argued, ‘the metaphor of post-Fordism ... is not committed to any prior determining position for the economy. But it does insist ... that shifts of this order in economic life must be taken seriously in any analysis of our present circumstances’ (Hall, 1989: p. 119). This returns us to the question of the relationship between post-Fordism and postmodernism as two of the most powerful descriptions of structural change in current use. I would not want to suggest any direct correspondence between the two either in terms of periodisation or putative content, though David Harvey has attempted to argue as much in his bold account of contemporary cultural change 3 (Harvey, 1989). Nor is it my objective to arrive at a conceptualisation or definition of the postmodern. However, I will in the following chapters claim thatsomeof the cultural shifts and characteristics associated with postmodernism and postmodernity can be understood, indeed can most profitably be understood, in relation to the crisis of Fordism and the complex of responses to it that goes under the name post-Fordism. It is important to state here that this relation is not a causal one. Many aspects of postmodernism can be traced back well into the period of Fordism and before. For example, if we consider the observation, central to many accounts of postmodernity, that culture has been taken over by the market and its imperatives then we must acknowledge that this development can be situated as far back as the 1920s when the importance of mass consumption, and hence cultural images of the ‘good life’, 4 to economic growth was first widely established. Thus such ‘postmodern’ characteristics as the mobilisation of desire as an economic force, or the saturation of social and subjective life with fantasy images that call into question distinctions between surface and depth or the real and the represented, must be understood as relatively continuous and long-term social processes which aroused comment and concern well before the turn towards post-Fordism or the emergence of so-called 5 postmodernist claims about the ‘society of the spectacle’ or ‘hyperreality’. Other features associated with postmodernity must also be seen in terms of the historical continuity of capitalist development. The diminishing importance of labour, production and even social class as orienting categories derives not simply from the unchallenged supremacy of consumption in contemporary social life, but also from the logic of modern capitalist production itself, in which automation – the replacement of living labour by dead labour as Marx put it – has been the method preferred by employers seeking to discipline workers and boost profits. What is often presented as a specifically postmodern sense of being profoundly distanced or detached from living contact with the material substratum of human life, from a

6 CAPITAL, CLASS AND TECHNOLOGY IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN CULTURE direct and unmediated relationship with the natural or physical world out of which our means of subsistence are produced, has in fact been noted by analysts of ‘modern life’ since the late-nineteenth century, though the idea received particular attention 6 during the 1950s, the first fully Fordist decade in the United States. Similarly, stories about the dissolution of classes and class consciousness (usually meaning theworkingclass andworking-classconsciousness) which are often part and parcel of postmodern positions or descriptions of postmodernity, are only extensions of earlier arguments that surrounded the scientific rationalisation of industrial labour in the 1910s and ’20s and were intensified with the further automation and 7 bureaucratisation of work in the full Fordism of the 1950s. And related claims that postmodernity brings with it an unprecedented dispersal and unlocatability of power 8 were also anticipated and rehearsed during the 1950s. Yet therearesignificantly new conditions that have emerged from the economic crises of the 1970s and ’80s and the shift from Fordism to post-Fordism. Perhaps the most fundamental of these flow from the break-up of the class compromise that underpinned the postwar boom and allowed commentators to characterise this period as one of relative social consensus and political placidity. The drive to return to the high levels of profitability enjoyed during the heyday of Fordist growth has entailed an attack upon the perceived ‘rigidities’ of labour markets and industrial relations, and upon the share of social wealth enjoyed by wage-earners, that manifests itself in deeply altered patterns of production and consumption. The years since the early 1970s have witnessed huge breakdowns and shifts in the regional and global distribution of production in which the export of many kinds of industrial activity out of the advanced capitalist countries has perhaps been the principal feature. For some commentators this is simply confirmation of the move towards a ‘postindustrial’ or ‘informational’ economic order presented as an evolutionary step in the human mastery of nature that takes Western societies beyond the era of heavy industrial manufacturing (Bell, 1973 and 1980a; Naisbitt, 1982; Stonier, 1983; Drucker, 1993). For others it constitutes a deliberate strategy of de-industrialisation by which owners and employers struggle to remove production from those areas in which organised labour had attained considerable power. It thus must be understood as a political and ideological offensive waged upon the capital–labour accord institutionalised under Fordism with the objective of recomposing its terms in favour of the owning and employing classes (Bluestone and Harrison, 1982; Clark, 1989; Hayes, 1990). This redistribution of production, and the redistribution of power and wealth that is its consequence, has in many respects been facilitated by new information or microelectronic technologies which, while constituting new branches of production and sources of profit in themselves, also bring with them new experiences and understandings of time and space, and new conduits and images of power. Thus the process of fragmentation that is often associated with both post-Fordism and postmodernism can be seen to have economic, social, and subjective or experiential dimensions. This redistribution of production has been accompanied by a recomposition of Fordist patterns of consumption. On the one hand, there has been a prolonged contest over the past twenty years to reduce the ‘citizen wage’ or the amount of social wealth allocated to the working class through the welfare apparatus (Bowles and Gintis, 1982: p. 53). On the other hand, the search for higher rates of